Monday, March 31, 2008

Anyone who has worked in a large organization — or, for that matter, reads the comic strip “Dilbert” — is familiar with the “org chart” strategy. To hide their lack of any actual fucking ideas about what to do, managers sometimes make a big bullshit show of rearranging the boxes and lines that say who reports to whom.

You now understand the principle behind the motherfuckers in the Bush administration and their craptacular new proposal for financial reform, which will be formally announced today: it’s all about creating the appearance of responding to the current ginormous steaming shitpile, without actually doing anything fucking substantive. The rescue of Bear Stearns, in particular, was kind of, you know, a paradigm-changing event. In other words: the motherfuckin' shit hit the motherfuckin' fan.

Traditional, deposit-taking banks have been regulated since the 1930s, because the experience of the Great Depression showed how bank failures can threaten the whole economy, like how Ann Coulter’s cock threatens to consume Sean Hannity's tiny penis. Supposedly, however, “non-depository” institutions like Bear didn’t have to be regulated, because “market discipline” would ensure that they were run responsibly. Just like how Dick Cheney supposedly doesn’t keep the festering corpse of Ayn Rand in his man-sized safe so he can ass-fuck it daily while humming the “Ballad of the Green Berets” and imagining he is biting the heads off live pigeons and force feeding them to innocent prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.

When push came to shove, however, the goddamm Federal Reserve didn’t dare let market discipline run its course. God for-fucking-bid. Instead, it rushed to Bear’s rescue, risking billions of taxpayer dollars, because it feared that the collapse of a major financial institution would endanger the financial system as a whole, and then the parties in Sardinia with hookers spray-painted silver and gold statues of boys pissing champagne would come to a grinding halt.

And if shitty financial players like Bear are going to receive the kind of rescue previously limited to deposit-taking banks, the implication seems obvious: they should be regulated like motherfucking banks, too.

The shitheel Bush administration, however, has spent the last seven years trying to do away with government oversight of the financial industry. In fact, the new plan was originally conceived of as “promoting a competitive financial services sector leading the world and supporting continued economic innovation.” That’s banker-speak for "get the fuck rid of any goddamm regulations that annoy big swinging dick financial operators."

To reverse course now, and seek expanded regulation, which any moron with the brains of a slug would do, the administration would have to back down on its free-market ideology — and it would also have to face up to the fact that it was full of shit. And this administration would rather blow OJ Simpson in Independence Hall than admit that it made a mistake.

Thus, in a draft of a speech to be delivered on Monday, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, declares, “I do not believe it is fair or accurate to blame our regulatory structure for the current turmoil.” Then he invited the Washington press corps to blow him the Rose Garden while wearing a french beret and smoking Gaulois.

And sure enough, according to the executive summary of the new administration pile of crap, regulation will be limited to institutions that receive explicit federal guarantees — that is, institutions that are already regulated, for fuck's sake, and have not been the source of today’s problems. As for the rest, it blithely declares that “market discipline is the most effective tool to limit systemic risk," and "Michael Chertoff is not a member of the undead prowling the streets of Adams Morgan on moonless nights feasting on human flesh."

The administration, then, has learned nothing from the current crisis. Yet it needs, to save its pasty buttocks, to pretend to be doing something.

So the Treasury has, with great fanfare, announced — you know what’s coming — its support for a rearrangement of the boxes on the org chart. OCC, OTS, and CFTC are out; PFRA and CBRA are in. What the fuck???

Will rearranging these boxes make any fucking difference? My head exploded, my massive brains spraying all over David Brooks' little white sailor suit, to see some news outlets report as fact the administration’s cover story — the claim that lack of coordination among regulatory agencies was an important factor in our current problems. My balls have more brains than the whistle dicks at CNN.

The truth is that that’s not what fucking happened. The various regulators actually did quite well at acting in a coordinated fashion. Unfortunately, they coordinated in the wrong goddamm direction. I know, you're shocked.

For example, there was a 2003 photo-op in which officials from multiple agencies used fucking pruning shears and chainsaws to chop up stacks of banking regulations. The occasion symbolized the shared determination of dickless Bush appointees to suspend adult supervision just as the financial industry was starting to run wild.

Oh, and the Bush administration assholes actively blocked state governments when they tried to protect families against predatory lending.

So, will the administration’s shitpile plan succeed? I’m not asking whether it will succeed in preventing future financial crises — that’s not its purpose. The question, instead, is whether it will succeed in confusing the issue sufficiently to stand in the way of real reform.

Let’s hope not. As I said, America’s fucked-up-edness incidents have been getting bigger. A decade ago, the market disruption that followed the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management was considered a major, scary-ass event; but compared with the current earthquake, the L.T.C.M. crisis was a pimple on Rush Limbaugh's flabby white ass.

If we don’t reform the fucking system system this time, the next crisis could well be an even bigger shitpile. And I, for one, really don’t want to live through a replay of the motherfucking 1930s.